Comment: Fighting the good fight against fake news

This week our team have been joining forces with local and regional titles across the UK to launch a campaign to fight fake news.

As we approach the most significant national election in a generation, the need for independent local newspapers and their websites to report and explain the issues in an entirely neutral, honest and balanced way is essential.

Johnston Press campaign logo SUS-170427-141809001

This approach is in keeping with the ethos of always seeking to provide trusted news, campaigning on behalf of their communities, giving advertisers respected platforms to promote their services, exposing wrongdoing through painstaking investigations, and ensuring that the voice of residents and the business community is heard with clarity and authority.

Perhaps most markedly, this has meant highlighting the dangers presented where we live to NHS services because of government cuts, such as the plans to remove more services from Hemel Hempstead Hospital and concentrate on receveloping Watford.

If you want a reliable, local news source, then there is nowhere more reliable than the local press.

This newspaper and its website are accountable for every single word we publish.

We have signed up to a comprehensive Editors’ Code of Practice that encompasses everything from accuracy to privacy, harassment, intrusion into grief or shock, protecting children, reporting crime, and the use of clandestine devices and subterfuge.

As a result, virtually all the content that we generate ourselves is produced by journalists trained by the National Council for the Training of Journalists to the highest industry benchmarks.

If we do make a genuine mistake, you can contact us immediately – we are real people, we’re not some digital algorithm.

We are passionate and exquisitely professional about the way in which we hold decision makers to account and how we represent our home towns.

We are honest brokers of local information, upholding the values that you share with us, seeking always to do the right thing no matter how difficult that can sometimes be.